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Alaska Airlines plans to keep flying more places from Seattle

Seattle-based Alaska Airlines’ expansion to destinations beyond its traditional West Coast network has been part of a plan to be the airline Seattle residents fly wherever they go in North America, Alaska Air Group Chief Financial Officer Brandon Pedersen said Tuesday.

Alaska Airlines and sister carrier Horizon Air carried just over 49 percent of the passengers flying out of Sea-Tac Airport in 2009, according to the airport’s most-recent annual activity report. That was relatively unchanged from the prior three years.

In recent years, Alaska has added service from Seattle to such destinations as St. Louis, Atlanta, Houston, Austin, Minneapolis, Kona, Hawaii, and Cancun, Mexico.

Look at a map of which big U.S. cities the airline still doesn’t serve, he added. “Ultimately, some day, we would love to be able to fly to those places as well, whether it’s Detroit or Baltimore or Nashville. There’s probably five or six cities on that list.”

Alaska doesn’t fly internationally (beyond Mexico) but has partnered with such airlines as Delta and American, which do take travelers overseas from Seattle.

There’s still plenty of room for Alaska to expand at Sea-Tac Airport, Pedersen said. “Seattle can absolutely accommodate the growth that we have planned over the next five years.”

And that growth should mean more local jobs, perhaps with more bonuses such as the more-than one-month’s pay Alaska Air Group is paying out to its employees for exceeding financial and operational goals for the 2010.

“Obviously the objective is to grow the company,” Pedersen said. “To the extent we add more airplanes, more airplanes means more pilots and more airplanes means more flight attendants and more departures out of Seattle means more customer service agents.”

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